“We musm’t consider assassination-after all-as the chief path to political truth.”
Ch’en was leaving.
“At the first meeting of the Central Committee I shall propose the immediate parceling of lands,” said Kyo, holding out his hand to Vologin, “the cancellation of credits.”
“The Committee won’t vote them,” answered Volo- gin, smiling for the first time.
Ch’en, a squat shadow on the sidewalk, was waiting. Kyo joined him after having obtained the address of his friend Possoz: he was in charge of the harbor commission.
“Listen. ” said Ch’en.
The vibration of the printing-presses, transmitted by the ground, controlled and regular like that of a ship’s engine, went right through them: in the sleeping city the delegation building was awake with all its lighted windows, across which black figures moved back and forth. They walked, their two similar shadows before them: the same figures, the same effect of their sweater- necks. The straw-huts glimpsed through the perspective of the streets, with their purgatory silhouettes, disappeared in the depth of the calm and almost solemn night, in the smell of fish and burnt grease; Kyo could not free himself from that reverberation of machines transmitted by the soil to his muscles-as if those machines for manufacturing truth were encountering, within himself, Vo- login’s hesitations and affirmations. During his journey up the river he had constantly felt how poorly informed he really was, how difficult it was for him to get a solid basis for his activity if he no longer consented purely and simply to obey the instructions of the International. But the International was wrong. It was ao longer possible to gain time. The Communist propaganda had reached the masses like a flood, because it was what they wanted, because it was their o-wn. However cautious Moscow might be, this propaganda could no longer be stopped; Chiang knew it and was henceforth committed to crushing the Communists. There lay the only certainty. Perhaps the Revolution could have been conducted in some other way; but it was too late. The Communist peasants would take over the lands, the Communist workers would demand a different labor system, the Communist soldiers would no longer fight unless they knew why they were fighting-whether Moscow wanted it or not.
Moscow and the enemy capitals of the West could organize their opposing passions over there in the night and attempt to mold them into a world. The Revolution, so long in parturition, had reached the moment of its delivery: now it would have to give birth or die. At the same time that the fellowship of the night brought Ch’en closer to him, Kyo was seized by a feeling of dependence, the anguish of being nothing more than a man, than himself; there came back to him the memory of Chinese Mohammedans he had seen, on nights just like this, prostrate on the plains covered with sun-scorched lavender, howling those songs that for thousands of years have torn the man who suffers and who knows he is to die. ^\Vhy had he come to Hankow? To inform the International of the situation in Shanghai. The International was as determined as he had become. What he had heard, much more distinctly than the arguments of Vologin, was the silence of the factories, the distress of the dying city, bedecked with revolutionary glory, but dying none the less. They might as well bequeath this cadaver to the next insurrectional wave, instead of letting it dissolve in crafty schemes. No doubt they were all condemned: the essential was that it should not be in vain. It was certain that Ch’en also felt bound to him by a prisoner’s friendship:
“It’s not knowing … " said the latter. “If it’s a question of killing Chiang Kai-shek, I know. As for this fellow Vologin, it’s all the same to him I guess; but for him, instead of murder, it’s obedience. For people who live as we do there must be a certainty. For him, carrying out orders is sure, I suppose, as killing is for me. Something mist be sure. Must be."
He was silent.
“Do you dream much?" he went on.
“No. Or at least I don’t remember my dreams much."
“I dream almost every night. There is also distraction-day-dreaming. When I let myself go, I sometimes see the shadow of a cat, on the ground: more terrible than anything real. But there is nothing worse than dreams.”
“Than what kind of real thing?”
“I’m not the sort to feel remorse. In the business of murder the difficult thing isn’t to kil-the thing is not to go to pieces: to be stronger than. what happens inside one at that moment.”
Bitterness? Impossible to judge by the tone of voice, and Kyo could not see his face. In the solitude of the street the muffled hum of a distant car died away with the wind, which left the fragrance of orchards trailing among the camphor odors of the night.
“. If it were only that. No. It’s worse. Creatures.”
Ch’en repeated:
“Creatures. Octopuses especially. And I always remember.”
In spite of the vast reaches of the night, Kyo felt near to him as in a closed room.
“Has this lasted long?”
“Very. As long as I can remember. For some time it’s been less frequent. And I only remember. those things. I hate memories, as a rule. And I seldom have any: my life is not in the past, it’s before me.”
Silence.
“. The only thing I’m afraid of-afraid-is going to sleep. And I go to sleep every day.”
A clock struck ten. Some people were quarreling, in short Chinese yelps, deep in the night.
“. or going mad. Those octopuses, night and day, a whole life-time. And one never kills oneself, it appears, when one is mad. Never.”
“Does killing change your dreams?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll tell you after. Chiang.” Kyo had once and for all accepted the fact that his life was menaced, and that he was living among men who knew that theirs was daily menaced: courage did not astonish him. But it was the first time that he encountered the fascination of death, in this friend whom he could scarcely see, who spoke in an absent-minded voice-as if his words were brought forth by the same nocturnal power as his own anguish, by the all-powerful intimacy of anxiety, silence and fatigue. However, his voice had just changed.
“Do you think of it with. with anxiety?”
“No. With. ”
He hesitated:
“I’m looking for a word stronger than joy. There is no word. Even in Chinese. A … complete peace. A kind of. how do you say it? of. I don’t know. There is only one thing that is even deeper. Farther from man, nearer. Do you know opium?”
“Scarcely.”
“Then it’s hard to explain. Nearer what you call. ecstasy. Yes. But thick. Deep. Not light. An ecstasy towards. downward.”
“And it’s an idea that gives you that?”
“Yes: my own death.”
Still that distracted voice. “He wiH kill himself,” thought Kyo. He had listened to his father enough to know that he who seeks the absolute with such uncompromising zeal can find it only in sensation. A craving for the absolute, a craving for immortality-hence a fear of death: Ch’en should have been a coward; but he felt, like every mystic, that his absolute could be seized only in the moment. Whence no doubt his disdain for everything that did not lead to the moment that would join him to himself in a dizzy embrace. From this human form which Kyo could not even see emanated a blind force which dominated it-the formless matter of which fatality is made. There was something mad about this silent comrade meditating upon his familiar visions of horror, but also something sacred-as there always is about the presence of the inhuman. Perhaps he would Chiang only to kill himself. As Kyo tried to make out through the darkness that angular face with its kindly lips, he felt in himself the shudder of the primordial anguish, the same as that which threw Ch’en into the arms of the octopuses of sleep and into those of death.
“My father believes,” said Kyo slowly, “that the essence of man is anguish, the consciousness of his own fatality, from which all fears are born, even the fear of death. but that opiwn frees you from it: therein lies its virtue.”